Sarah Hadley was born in Boston and studied both art history and photography at Georgetown University and the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC. She spent time in her 20's studying and working at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Biennale in Venice, Italy, where she first started photographing seriously. She worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress and as a photojournalist for a newspaper in Virginia before moving to Chicago in 1996, where she founded the Filter Photo Festival. During her time in Chicago, she received Illinois Arts Council and Chicago Artist Grants, as well as several Fellowships to the Ragdale Foundation. She collaborated with Susan Tillett, then the Director of Ragdale, on a book called The Ragdale House Speaks, which was published in 2012. In 2008, she moved to Los Angeles to photograph the Time Out Los Angeles Guidebook.

Recently, Hadley's photographs have been exhibited at the Porto Photo Festival (Portugal), the Lishui Photo Festival (China), Fotofever (Paris), PhotoLA, the Worldwide Photography Biennial (Buenos Aires) and the Ballarat Festival (Australia), as well in galleries and museums around the US - most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photography, The Robin Rice Gallery, Fabrik Projects Gallery and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts. Her work is held in museums, corporate & private collections, has been published in Photo District News (PDN), The Oxford American, B&W Magazine, SHOTS, Lenscratch.com and The Sun and been licensed for use in numerous books, magazines and websites. In 2017, Hadley was named one of the top 200 by Critical Mass.

In addition to her own studio practice, Hadley has curated exhibitions in the US, France and China. Hadley is the Marketing Director at the Los Angeles Center of Photography and produces Exposure, their Annual Portfolio Reviews. She was the Associate Producer of Photo Independent, a Los Angeles Art Fair. Hadley has also been a juror of many photo competitions, including Critical Mass in 2015 and 2016, and a portfolio reviewer at SPE National and the Lishui Photo Festival in China. She has written articles for Lenscratch.com and Don't Take Pictures magazine, as well as book reviews and interviews for Publisher's Weekly and F-Stop Magazine. She mentors individual artists on career and marketing strategies and works with photography centers, fairs and institutions on strategic planning, fundraising, marketing and social media. Feel free to contact her if you have any questions, would like to purchase her prints or would like to work with her in some capacity.

Hadley currently lives in the mountains of LA, but treasures the ability to dip her toes in the Pacific Ocean on a regular basis. She is currently working on a project about her childhood growing up in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her family moved to the top floor of the museum in 1970 (where her father had just become the Director) and she was fortunate enough to spend the next 18 years surrounded by paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Whistler, and Sargent.